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I am in the process of designing a cryptographic Proof of Storage (PoS) that relies on single threaded computation of SHA256 hashes. In practice, my algorithm is equivalent to computing for some string S the value SHA256^N(S) = SHA256(SHA256(SHA256(...(SHA256(S)))).

This forces anything computing that function to use only one thread, as each SHA256 step needs the output of the previous as input.

Now, I know that ASIC miners exist that can compute SHA256 hashes at an enormous rate. This, however, is due to their parallelism: completing Proofs of Work (i.e., finding zeros of hash functions) is an embarassingly parallel problem and can be computed very fast on massively parallel devices. This is not what I am looking for.

What I am looking for is the fastest device that would be able to compute my function, i.e., single-threaded computation of a SHA256, then the SHA256 of its output, the SHA256 of the result and so on.

I thought that maybe in this case the best hardware would be the fastest CPU in terms of single threaded performance: I found here that Intel Core i7-7700K could be a good place to start looking for.

Is there any other known specialized hardware device that could carry out the task faster?

I am working in an artistic/visualization project that analyses Bitcoin transactions. I have a Bitcore instance with insight API and from a Python script I query through the REST API so the queries are returned in json format. For the project I use a macbook pro and with its internal ssd drive I get around 70 queries per second, using an external NTFS (fuse drivers) driver I get as little as 5 per second.

I would like to know if there is a faster way to query transactions by transaction’s hash even if it is more complex to code.

What would be the fastest way to query for a certain txid to get its inputs?